The Guardians Read online

  The bells were at it again. But this time they summoned him to practical response. Pausing in Radcliffe Square, he took out his watch and checked by it the large syllables pulsing in the air above him. Then he walked on more quickly. Within a space of minutes that need not be recorded, his own old college was before him.

  CHAPTER III

  Quail’s recollections of the Warden were tenuous. He hadn’t even remembered that Charles Jopling was a clergyman. Perhaps, in those days, he hadn’t been. It was possible that clerical habiliments, and even some appropriate dilution of sacerdotal function and pastoral concern, were still required by the college of its Wardens as a regular thing. Certainly the old Warden – Quail’s Warden – had been in Holy Orders. But then he had been an archbishop’s son and married to the daughter of an earl who was a bishop as well – so his dog-collar had been no more than a congruous part of the general scene. Jopling in that vanished spacious era had certainly been a law tutor – Quail didn’t recall ever having been addressed by him – and he continued, surely, to publish books on jurisprudence from time to time. There was no reason why a clergyman should not do that. And yet as Jopling stood before his ranks of well-tooled leather, alert in an admirably preserved later middle age, cordial after a fashion that yet suggested itself as accustomed to keep office hours, he wasn’t at all Quail’s idea of a priest.

  But from this – Quail reflected – it didn’t even tenuously follow that he wasn’t God’s. Jopling had an odd trick of mildly profane ejaculation, indeed, which Quail associated with a certain sort of old-fashioned laymen rather than with clerics. But this was perhaps a matter of his own obstinately New Worldly quality; and anyway it was nothing to pause over. At least the Warden was being civil. Itinerant old members must be two a penny in every Oxford college, and Quail had rather anxiously debated with himself, the pros and cons of making his presence known in advance. Deciding to do so, he had despatched a letter expressing the hope that he might at some convenient time be allowed to call. Even as he licked the envelope, he had known this epistolary effort to be comically formal; and he had dropped it into the mail-box only on the thought that one might as well strike at the start, one’s own authentic if archaic note. The reply had been immediate, and charmingly easy. In the matter of striking his own note, the Warden had clearly no difficulty at all. And his letter had fixed this lunch.

  “Old members?” The Warden took up Quail’s suggestion, made over a glass of dry sherry, that these must indeed at times be inconveniently thick on the ground. “It is very pleasant, I assure you, to meet them again as individuals. Commonly they come in swarms – to Gaudies, and affairs of that sort. And—by Jove—they are old at times. I’ve met military ornaments of this place that you’d swear must have fought at Waterloo. But they’re nothing to the crusted old lawyers. Last year I had sitting by me an eminent barrister who was ninety-five if he was a day. Yes, I’ll swear he had been a Q.C. first and a K.C. afterwards.” The Warden paused, set down his glass, and softly rubbed his finger-tips each against each. “Do you know what he said to me? ‘Warden,’ he said, ‘you can have been only a very junior tutor when I came up.’ He said it rather accusingly, you know. It was the deuce of a shock.” Reaching to replenish Quail’s glass, the Warden laughed the laugh of a man impervious to any shock whatever. “Yes, it was quite a staggerer. When I rose from High Table I felt that the butler ought to be handing me my crutches . . . I take it you’re at Harvard still?”

  “Dear me, no.” Quail found the switch to this odd question puzzling. “I’m not quite ninety-five yet, Warden. Nevertheless Harvard is very much past history with me.”

  “You must forgive me. All my information is dreadfully out of date. Our men win all sorts of distinctions that I just can’t keep my hands on. I’ve been quite sure that it is at Harvard that you hold your Chair.”

  “You mean as a professor?” Quail looked at his host in astonishment. “I’m not a professor and never have been. My business is with railroads.”

  “Railroads? Dear me, how very interesting . . . how very interesting indeed.” The Warden took up his glass again and canvassed its depths with apparent concentration. Quail supposed him to be wondering what on earth could be said by way of further conversation to a man of whom one knows nothing whatever except that railroads make the mainstay of his diurnal occasions.

  There was a silence. Quail was faintly embarrassed – not the less so for guessing that the Warden himself was not. Jopling was far from being the sort of person who is stumped in uncouth company. But the light suggestion of in fact being so, was something that it amused him to sketch into the situation for the moment. As a whimsy this was scarcely gratifying. But at least Quail was finding himself in the position of being genuinely unknown; and here he was pleased. He saw nothing flattering, indeed, in being taken for a college professor. His weakness for the pursuit of learning carried him not quite to that. But life had so dealt with him that he was by the stiffest standard a wealthy man, and any approximation to anonymity was always welcome. He had been not without a sense that, as far as his old college went, he might well be, so to speak, down on a list; not perhaps in the grossness of black and white, but at least in the prudent awareness of those charged with the future material welfare of the society. Old Dr Stringfellow, even if amid the largest practical innocence, had sufficiently known what was what in railroads. But old Dr Stringfellow – as well as being a man of almost preternaturally extensive knowledge – belonged to another college. Here, if the Warden was to be trusted, Quail was no more than a presentable former Rhodes Scholar who had turned up again as Rhodes Scholars often do.

  To be received with an amiable courtesy on just those terms seemed to Quail the pleasantest thing in the world, and he was far from resenting in the Warden’s manner any tenuous overtone of irony. One could take that indeed as flattering; as a shade of behaviour offered for one’s amusement because one had been adjudged a person to whom shades are perceptible. All in all, Quail’s reception was reactivating the shadowy sense of guilt that he had brought with him to Oxford. He wondered whether he ought to offer a short explanatory speech to Jopling here and now. But if he did, Jopling might make little of it. And this would be merely awkward.

  “Railroads . . . yes, to be sure.” The Warden glanced covertly at a clock, and Quail wondered if anyone else had been asked to lunch. “The terminology”—the Warden’s bland features deftly simulated sudden inspiration—”the terminology is so interestingly different on your side. Chair-cars and flag-stops and grade-crossings and check-rooms. All unknown to dear old British Railways . . . ah, here’s my wife.” He turned his head – a handsome head with rather freely flowing hair – towards a lady who had just glided in a somewhat serpentine fashion into the room. “My dear, this is Mr Quain.”

  “Quail,” Quail said.

  “I know Mr Quail very well – by his books, that is to say.” Mrs Jopling put out a hand, and Quail had a sense of just managing to take it without uncourtly hesitation. This had merely been because Mrs Jopling possessed a habit of quick darting gestures, which somehow prompted the feeling that at any pronounced movement she might vanish behind a bookcase or beneath a chair. She was giving her husband a swift look now. “Yes – at least we know Mr Quail by his publications. They are much en l’air.” It was with a considerable and unexpected assumption of grandeur that Mrs Jopling delivered herself of this gratifying although scarcely accurate statement.

  “Ah, yes – to be sure. His books, of course.” The Warden turned aside to provide his wife with sherry. He might have been conjecturing that Quail’s publications presumably consisted of some superior species of time-table.

  “Such a deep understanding of a wonderful personality.”

  “Precisely.” The Warden was peering in discontent at the decanter. “Manzanilla, my dear. I’m not sure that you care for it.”

  “Fontaney.” Mrs Jopling, who appeared to fulfil in the Lodge the role of a pertinaciously prompting intelligenc
e, pronounced the name distinctly. “A wonderful personality, indeed.”

  “Not a doubt of it.” This time the Warden looked at the clock openly. “Perhaps we had better be going in?” He moved across the room and then paused. “Arthur Fontaney.” He uttered the Christian name with authority – much as if he were standing at the font with the wonderful personality in his arms. “I am tremendously interested in Arthur Fontaney. Always have been. We must talk about him. Yes—by Jove!—a wonderful opportunity. Quail – as I very well know – is absolutely the man. Some time we must have a talk about Fontaney. Some time when we both dine in hall—eh? It’s a pleasure I positively won’t be denied . . . nobody else coming, Alice? Then we must certainly go in.”

  Mrs Jopling touched Quail on the arm. “Sans façon,” she said grandly.

  The Warden’s butler was morosely removing a fourth set of knives and forks. He had all the seediness – Quail noted it with pleasure – that had been a pervasive and endearing characteristic of the college long ago. It was one of the clever things about the old Warden and Lady Elizabeth that they had never even in the Lodge departed far from that ubiquitous accent. The great drawing-room itself had been a little shabby – owning a discernible cousinship, so to speak, with the murkily commodious dungeon which the fellows called their senior common room. It was one up to the Joplings if they had kept in that swim.

  “Such a pity about dear Michael.” As she sat down, Mrs Jopling stabbed the air in the direction of the empty place. “Of course, I only asked him at the shortest notice. One doesn’t try to make long-standing engagements with Michael. He has de l’imprévu. And he is a great deal in demand.”

  “Michael not coming? Too bad.” The Warden turned to his guest. “Just one of our undergraduates. But a kinsman – quite a close kinsman – of my wife’s. You’d like him.”

  “You would certainly like him.” Where the Warden had been casual, Mrs Jopling was enthusiastic. “Unfortunately he had promised to lunch with a friend – a House man. He was charmingly au désespoir.”

  Quail crumbled a roll and murmured suitable words. The House, of course, was Christ Church. But you didn’t talk about a House man. You said “a Christ Church man” or “a man at the House”. He marvelled that after all these years this tiny aberration in Mrs Jopling was as patent to him as would have been a proposal to gobble soup from the point of her spoon. It was not the sort of thing one could take any credit for remembering over a quarter of a century. Quail wondered how much of his young energies he had then wasted on grasping the place’s more useless social shades. But there was no doubt that now they were all part of that nostalgic complex he had detected in himself.

  He was aware of silence. The conversational initiative appeared to have been passed to him. “You must take great pleasure in the Lodge,” he said. “I see I’m not wrong in having remembered it as being delightful inside as well as out.”

  “You’ve been inside the Lodge before?” Mrs Jopling’s tone hinted displeasure, and for a moment she stilled her darting head to a majestic immobility. Perhaps she disapproved of references invoking a former regime. Possibly she had constructed for herself the myth that Lady Elizabeth had exercised only the most scandalously scant hospitality. “The Lodge is very fine,” she added more graciously.’ ‘But, under modern conditions, difficult to run.’’

  “I admire this room – and particularly the Adam fireplace.” Quail felt that this stiff strain was the best he could manage at the moment.

  Mrs Jopling turned with her saurian movement to examine the object referred to. “Yes, it is very good – very good, indeed. There is a similar one in the Judge’s Lodging – only not so handsome.”

  Quail offered a murmur indicative of accepting this comparative judgment unreservedly although necessarily upon trust.

  “But this one is extremely extravagant.”

  “Extravagant?”

  “The grate. It simply eats coal.”

  “I see.” At present, Quail supposed, the voracious grate had been put on a strict diet. A gloomy smouldering process was just observable in its recesses.

  “And there is the carrying of the coal, you know – a great strain on the servants. Only the other day I found Michael—”

  “My wife’s young relation, as I mentioned.” The Warden threw this in parenthetically.

  “I found Michael giving a hand at hauling scuttles of coal up from the cellars – just by way of helping poor old Roberts out. It was not quite en règle – but charming of him nevertheless. Coal fires ought to be a thing of the past, as they are in your country, Mr Quail. I tremendously admire American progressiveness in matters of that sort. It makes up for everything.”

  “I’m very glad you think so, ma’am.”

  “Actually, there is a project among the fellows for having central heating all through the college. But—would you believe it?—there has been never a word of including the Lodge, which is no more than seventy-five yards away, across the garden. I sent Roberts out to measure it the other day. And it’s not, Mr Quail, as if we didn’t play our part. Charles and I entertain a great deal, although under present conditions it is a costly and often exhausting thing to have to do.”

  “I suppose so.” Quail found that poor old Roberts was gloomily offering him a dish of peas. He took a spoonful with misgiving.

  “And it isn’t even as if the Lodge had been at all well appointed when we moved in. There were things that would surprise you. And virtually nothing provided except pictures. Scores of enormous pictures – former Wardens and animal-studies and so on – and none of them worth twopence. I had a man down from London to find out. He described them as falling into the class of good furnishing pictures. But you can’t feed off pictures, or even stop draughts with them. The biggest expense was curtains for the drawing-room. You will see them presently. The stuff cost nearly seven pounds a yard.”

  “I’m sure it must be extremely handsome.” Quail, conscious that the conversation had reached what must surely be its very nadir, rather awkwardly caught the Warden’s glance. It surprised him. Quail had for a good many years indulged himself in the sporadic picking-up of works of art, and a certain consequent frequentation and employment of professionals in the field had made him aware of what he categorised as the connoisseur’s eye. It was precisely this that he found himself glimpsing now. The Warden might be appraising, as if for possible acquisition, the little conversation-piece constituted by his wife and this wandering American.

  An extravagant notion like this was shocking to Quail, and it resulted in his addressing his host with the first words to enter his head. “Coming down—I mean up—on the train yesterday, I found myself travelling with Dr Stringfellow. I never did more than attend his lectures and, for a term, a small class in his rooms. But he recognised me at once, and spoke to me. I was astonished.”

  The Warden laughed. “Stringfellow? His memory must go back a great deal farther than you. He is getting on, you know. And I think I can tell you that, over there”—and the Warden gave a large leonine nod which appeared to indicate some locality on the farther side of Oxford High Street—”over there, he has had more than a hint that it is time to go. They can’t turn him out, of course. Comes under old statutes. There for life, if he chooses.”

  “It must be a delicate matter, surely, to have to give a hint about.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.” The Warden was genially amused. “Only last week, as a matter of fact, I heard rather a good thing in their common room. Somebody was twitting the old boy, you know; smoking him, as the phrase used to be. ‘Stringfellow,’ he was asked, ‘what does it feel like to have attained to the dignity of being a survival?’ ‘My good sir,’ he replied, ‘I have long since ceased to be a survival and become an anachronism; and I propose in the fullness of time to attain the status of a crying scandal.’” The tips of the Warden’s fingers came together. “Rather good, eh?”

  Quail was preserved from the necessity of finding any comment upon this anecdot
e by the interposition of Mrs Jopling, who appeared to have taken in no more than a single prompting word in the foregoing talk. “I am sorry to say, Mr Quail, that there is much that is positively scandalous in the life of the college today. And it is entirely attributable to Mr Tandon.”

  “G. S. Tandon?”

  “Quite right.” The Warden, interrupting with this, gave his wife what had to be interpreted as a cautionary glance. “Gavin Tandon is now Senior Tutor. He and I are exact contemporaries, and it once looked as if we should be running for All Souls together. But I withdrew when I got my offer here, and he came on three years later. So I was always senior to him, so far as standing in the college was concerned.” The Warden gave his easy amiable laugh. “Poor Tandon – not what you would call a clubbable man. Know him?”

  Quail shook his head. “Not personally.”

  “Naturally not.” The Warden’s laugh, this time more resonant, echoed for a moment in the large formal room. “There isn’t, really, a person to know.”

  “Of course I am familiar with some of his work.”

  “Is that so?” The Warden was momentarily vague, and then confidently emphatic. “But you would be. Yes, indeed. I’m sorry about this Moselle. It’s 1949, and quite authentically Beeren-Auslese, as their jargon is. But the vineyard’s not one I know, and it has too much of the slate, if you ask me. Remember 1921?”